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A solid time-waster

There's a trap you can fall into when you're playing a game for review: the trap of losing consciousness.

By Darren ZenkoSpecial to the Star

Sat., July 5, 2008

Platform: Nintendo DS

Price: $39.99

Rated: E (everyone)

There's a trap you can fall into when you're playing a game for review: the trap of losing consciousness.

Not that you fall asleep or something (though sometimes that, too), but that you'll get your head out of the gamespace only to realize a morning, an afternoon, a whole day has gone by and you haven't actually thought about what you're doing; you've zoned out. Twenty hours of "work" and your notebook is empty; you've got nothing.

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Welcome to my Lost Weekend with Final Fantasy Tactics A2: Grimoire of the Rift.

On one level, that ought to count big in a game's favour, the ability to facilitate self-hypnosis to the point where time and mind just ... go away.

What are games – portable games, especially – for, if not for passing time? But there's passing time and there's wasting it, and after throwing most of a Canada Day weekend into the latest in Square Enix's series of swords-'n'-sorcery skirmish simulators, I can't help but feel – Star paycheque notwithstanding – the game offers more of the latter than the former.

Set in the "Ivalice" branch of the ever-expanding Final Fantasy multiverse, FFTA2 continues on with the style and core concepts established in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance: a young lad is transported into a magical world of near-constant battles, and must gather and train a fighting clan of his own in order to survive and seek a way home.

His comrades-in-arms will be drawn from dozens of professions – ninjas, paladins, beastmasters, mages, monks, thieves – and developing their abilities and deploying them on the battlefields of Ivalice will be the keys to his success.

In practical terms, this means a game that has almost as much in common with sports-management simulators as with role-playing games.

Much of your playtime is taken up with making sure your team has the right equipment to develop the right abilities, with drafting the right recruits and deploying the special teams best-suited to each situation.

It's a lot of bookkeeping and micro-management, which is a plus in this genre – the depth of options for personnel, equipment, abilities and strategy is what we come to these games for, and it's totally engrossing if you're into it: I've spent more time on fretting over the career of a single Bangaa Warrior than I ever have over my real-world tax forms.

As for the actual game itself, the mercenary battling of various enemies, not all that much has changed from Final Fantasy Advance.

You're still plotting the turn-by-turn actions of your (usually) six-unit team on a smallish square-grid battlefield, attempting to meet your objective (usually "defeat all enemies") while abiding by the Laws – arbitrary edicts on what you can and can't do in battle – declared by the all-powerful Judges.

It's a don't-mess-with-it formula that balances simplicity and depth to create perfect time-consuming zone-out conditions: repetitive enough that you're mostly playing on Zen autopilot, with just enough variety and challenge to keep sedation from slipping into boredom.

And so the hours go. But when you shake off the hypnosis, what do you have?

The experience recedes like a dream, like heading home from a so-so movie and realizing you've already forgotten the main character's name.

The units you've obsessively husbanded haven't become real characters; the narrative, already thin, has been diluted into near-nothingness by the hundreds of miscellaneous quests, gigs and assignments that comprise the bulk of the game.

You feel empty, half-cheated: you've been taken out of this world, without really being transported to another.

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